


Anything but Bulletproof

by nerdygaycas



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV First Person, POV Original Percival Graves, The Road AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 17:42:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdygaycas/pseuds/nerdygaycas
Summary: We were the children of nothing, the men with empty stomachs and scruffy beards, the ones that lived on scraps, and saw no point in knowing which day of the week it was anymore.The one set in a post-apocalyptic, non-magical world.





	Anything but Bulletproof

**Author's Note:**

> this is so self-indulgent. So i watched The Road and then this happened...

The world had already turned bleak by then. The colors drained from all the things, the light of the sun dim and practically non-existent. Temperature followed the colors, or perhaps it had begun ebbing away even before them, I do not remember, but the sad fact is, the view matched the feeling gurgling inside all the scattered corpses that still struggled to survive in the wake of destruction and oblivion.

We were the children of nothing, the men with empty stomachs and scruffy beards, the ones that lived on scraps, and saw no point in knowing which day of the week it was anymore.

When I was born, it wasn’t quite as bad. My family had a home, many rooms and an abundance of food, of clothes, of something akin to humanity and decency.

The thieves came for our money and left with both my parents’ lives. They did not kill me because I was young, harmless. I was fourteen.

People were still people those days.

 

Lonely years passed, and I grew up, and the world turned darker and more dangerous. Shops ran out of stock, cattle died as did most crops. Everything was covered by either ashes or fire, the absence of one meant only the approach of the other.

Against all odds, I made something of myself, I became a sort of leader to a small band of outlaws. We called ourselves that but, in reality, we were little more than a handful of frightened bastards, abandoned, yes, but still fighting to live and see another day.

That lasted roughly five years though. We didn’t harm anyone, we did not kill or rape others to steal their stuff, and we did not sack small towns either. We walked long miles in search of unclaimed goods, and we did not let others take advantage of us – we did not yield.

But humanity had been rotten since the day it was created, and we were just that, humans. We were not saints, and our souls were so broken I sometimes doubted we still had them.

A band of siblings born to different mothers, neither of us looked alike, and I was one of the eldest and their chosen leader. I was responsible for them, their safety, their food, the coats keeping them warm through the long, cold nights.

They attacked at sunrise. Scourers is what everyone all called them. Flesh-eaters. Savages.

I lost all of them, my brothers and sisters hand-picked by tragedy. The universe had spared me a second time, maybe it simply enjoyed watching me squirm and cry myself to sleep.

I didn’t have time to grab my handgun when I escaped the slaughter of my camp. It was my quickest way out and thus my most cherished possession, even more than my barely ragged boots. My only treasure was the bullet in my pocket, priceless little thing I kept close to my heart.

I could’ve done it with a rope, so I searched for one. I walked great distances on blistered feet and with a blurred sight. Every breath choked me, death wrapped around my windpipe and tightened with each step I took.

 _This_ , I thought, _this is how I die_.

But my feet kept walking forward, and my heart didn’t cease its beating, and the raindrops falling on the tattered fabric of my overcoat chilled my marrow. Still I walked till I found what seemed an abandoned farm. There was a main house, a barn, a tractor and a well.

It would’ve been nice to say I ran straight to the well because I was thirsty, but all I wanted was to make myself with the its rope. It was in good conditions, it’d make a nice noose.

My hands were sore and dirty, and the sharp fibers sliced my skin as I tried cutting it with a rusty metal bar I kept always with me.

I was twenty-eight years old, and I’d made my hands bleed trying to cut loose a rope to hang myself with.

_Pathetic._

That’s when I heard the clicking hammer of a gun. My spine went rigid, my blood turned to ice. Through my mind flashed images of my long-dead friends. Mother and father were there too, killed in a brief second by a single bullet.

Then I remembered my reason for being there in the first place, suicide. Suddenly the click of a gun couldn’t scare me. Nothing could.

I had nothing, I was nothing.

Dead men cannot be killed.

“What do you want?” a boyish voice asked me. “What the hell do you want?”

“Nothing” _,_ I said, but he did not believe me. I felt the muzzle of the gun on my nape. _Do it_ , I begged silently. _Do it, kid, you’d save me so much trouble_.

But I could not bring myself to ask a stranger for mercy. I was still proud in my misery. I turned around slowly, hands raised in surrender.

My assailant was a young man with raven black hair and a shredded black coat, his shoes were scratched enough I could see the grey socks underneath, and his pale hands trembled. However, his eyes betrayed him the most, he was scared shitless. Scared of me, of the threat I posed and the situation he was in, of the shortage of water and food, of the mutilated bodies that decorated the streets and the total lack of information, the absolute terror.

There were many things to be afraid of, only a heartless one could be unafraid.

“I need the rope,” I said.

The boy didn’t seem dangerous, but even if he was it did not matter to me anymore.

He looked at me confused for a moment, but ropes, he knew, as well as everything else, were difficult to come by, so he nodded. He pointed at the bar of iron at my feet.

“To cut it,” I answered.

He did not say another word, but he didn’t leave. In the end, I took the rope in hand again and began the slow, inefficient process of cutting it with my blunt tool as he watched. My palms hurt and the friction produced a plaintive sound, nothingness drawing neigh.

After a while, I began feeling dizzy and could hardly keep my eyes open. When my brain caught up with the absurdity of my condition I laughed, the booming sound crushed my ribs, and resembled a rattle from deep within the earth.

The young man asked me what was wrong, and threatened to shoot me again when I did not answer.

Liar.

He couldn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it. He could’ve stayed safely hidden inside the house and wait for me to go, but he didn’t, he rushed out to meet me. He was lonely, just like me.

Days after I learned he had no bullets.

 

The farm had been owned by a couple with two little girls. Their corpses, Credence said, were still in the cellar.

We stayed there for two weeks, but the Scourers were heading our way, I’d heard their trucks beyond the woods. For all its domestic glory, there was no food left for us in the farm, just cold rooms and seemingly colder hearts, so we fled.

The open roads we stayed away from. They were the most dangerous since there was no place to hide when things went wrong, and they _always_ went wrong. So, we walked through the woods and followed rural paths, always heading South.

I got to know Credence from the way he acted every day, not from the things he said because he didn’t say much. He loved sugar, so whenever we came across sweets I would give them to him and that never failed to put a bright smile on his face. He would offer me some, and I would decline, and he would insist.

“Have some, please,” he would repeat, and I always ended up begrudgingly accepting. I was hungry, and my body was in no condition for courteous chivalries.

I also learned he liked singing, and he took great care of his garments, shabby as they were. His mood plummeted dramatically when we couldn’t start a fire for fear of being followed, but he seemed just as happy when we huddled together to keep warm.

Although his mood remained as unpredictable as ever, after a couple months he became politer, if possible, and gentler towards me.

He and I were alone, and we were all the other one had. I was especially fond of those fireless nights, his thin body fit eerily well against my soon-to-be concave one. Under raspy blankets and starless night-skies we slept, the scent of death and gasoline never too far from our noses.

“I wish we would die tonight,” he said to me once after dinner, canned peaches and a bag of potato chips. There was a charming glimmer in his eyes, and his lips were wet and soft due to the preserved fruity juice.

When I kissed him, he tasted sweet, better than any candy or chocolate I’d ever had.

I wanted to die with him too. I wanted us to fall asleep in each other’s arms, and never wake up.

 

We fucked like animals, Credence and me. It wasn’t sexy or pleasant, but it was real, and it made me _feel_. It reminded me I wasn’t dead yet.

The lack of provisions had us going at it with caution, but no matter how slow we took it, it always ended in pain and sometimes blood. Credence always apologized to me, but I never blamed him. I could only feel shame as I lay beneath him, tight and uncomfortable, mortified. We stopped trying that then, penetration. It was a futile attempt at normality anyway, and the type of pleasure I wasn’t allowed to feel again.

Credence was fine with it, I believe. He hadn’t had much experience from what I could recall, though he seldom openly talked about his past, but that was okay too.

What was the point of fixating on the past if there wasn’t a future to predict from it?

I did not speak of who I was before we met, neither of how respected my surname used to be. I swallowed my words when a memory of my mother’s compassion dangled from the tip of my tongue as well as that time I borrowed one of the three pairs of shoes my father owned to go on my very first date.

My parents didn’t trust the boy -Fernand- and neither did I, to be honest. I just wanted to go out and have some fun, silly of me, I know that now. Fernand tried to seduce me and proposed to me that same night, an obvious attempt to keep himself well-provisioned in the winter to come. I said no, of course. How could I’ve said otherwise?

He stole my father’s shoes.

I knew there was no future, no past, only the present, the now. In this instant I was alive, I was breathing air charged with poison, but breathing. Inhaling it as it corrupted my lungs and turned my blood to tar. I was alive as I kissed Credence’s chapped lips, as I held on to his thin arms and grunted my way through an orgasm that felt like a hollow punch, a swift blow to the back of the head. And I wondered then how different it would’ve been to meet Credence in a world that had not yet died. He would’ve been more meat than bones, and his fingernails would not be covered in dirt. He would’ve had many clothes, clean clothes, to choose from every day, and I would’ve make sure he ate three square meals a day. We would’ve lived in a house big enough to fit his heart and his smiles and my affection for him, and the sky would’ve been orange at dawn and dusk, and the air would’ve smelled of trees and wilderness and life.

But that was not our life.

I wished for fine cotton sheets, but all we had was a floor of dead leaves and a damp blanket covered in soot. I wished to have my legs wrapped around Credence, take him deep inside, and have our lips hurt from kisses instead of severe dehydration. I wished we weren’t just two dead people trying to feel alive again.

After having catch our breath, we pulled on our clothes and took our valuables with us, a backpack stuffed with: a cleaner blanket, some cans of food, a bottle of water, a scissor, a comb, a deck of cards, an old-fashioned compass, paper towels, a stopped watch, and a pack of cigarettes I’d found in the pocket coat of a dead guy.

The sky was a mauve hue of grey, and the ruins of the town we were caught rays of light on their ragged edges, making them seem almost beautiful, as if traced delicately.

Credence sang a tune off-beat and I hummed along. We walked so many miles that day we dropped off exhausted after washing ourselves in a clean river.

We were so tired we weren’t careful, and by the time we awoke our things had been stolen by a faceless coward.

I should’ve known that pale lilac sky augured no good.

From that day fortune turned on us. The weather changed for the worse as winter neared stealthily, yet we could only march forward, even though it felt as if we were walking backwards into an abyss.

We stopped our usual innocent bickering, we stopped talking too. We were companions but we weren’t together.

Credence took to muttering under his breath, and most of the time I ignored him, knowing it was his way of coping with the shit situation we were in, but one day I snapped. What the fuck was he mad about, I was going through the same shit too. I was just as angry and afraid, I was so fucking thin it was a miracle I still had some lean muscle to carry me on. Most of all I was miserable, just as he was.

“I want to fucking die too, you know!” I screamed at him. The trees around us were nothing but black, lifeless trunks. There were no birds perched on their branches, no leaves. “Go away if you hate me so much then, just go! I don’t need you, and you sure as hell don’t need me.”

Credence pounced on me, and hit my chest with closed fists while he screamed and tears ran down his cheeks. His beating hurt me, but just a little, he wasn’t very strong.

I pulled his faced close to mine, and kissed his forehead and the places streaked by the salt of his crying.

“I don’t hate you,” he whimpered, as he clung to my arms and buried his face in the crook of my neck, “I could never hate you.”

I wanted to say, _yes you can, you do_. But Credence had no need for my cynicism.

 

We found an abandoned house the next day. Credence did not want to me check in, but it’d been days since we had eaten anything for real, and we had run out of water. I could not let us die, not like that, not like starved beasts.

Credence waited outside, keeping guard, while I searched the house. A small kindness granted to him by the universe.

Inside the house, there was only blood and a fetid smell. I followed the scent to confirm my suspicions, or rather to satisfy a compulsory need to know there was nothing I could do to help.

(Credence always said I had a hero complex, but I only did it out of selfishness, to keep my conscience clean. I did not tell him I cared only for him, I did not say the rest of the world didn’t fucking matter to me.)

Behind the door leading to a small room I stumbled upon a pile of decomposing flesh, lacerated body parts strewn carelessly across the floor. A child and three adults, it seemed; I nearly threw up over their remains.

They had been tortured first, then used for food. Scourers.

I wandered around looking for food but found none. They weren’t picky, those fucking gross degenerates. They ate and stole everything they got their hands on.

From afar, I heard the rumble of a motor, and ran to Credence. We bolted from there, never looking over our shoulder, our legs about to snap like twigs, our hearts flapping out of our chests. I cut my leg with a tube of discarded iron, and it bled profusely.

Bandages soaked through quickly and I became weaker than ever, stumbling instead of walking, one foot in my grave.

We learned they had grown in numbers, the Scourers. It seemed they had a new leader, one by the name of Grindelwald or so. He had founded an organized system, a sadistic hierarchy of brutes and murderers that dominated all New England.

Like packs of wolves they preyed on the weak, stealing anything and killing anyone, raping and maiming left and right.

My nights turned into a never-ending string of insomnia in which I could only stare at Credence’s sleeping figure, and pray for strength to go on. _Where to though_ , I would ask myself.

We found no food and no water. My body ached at every minute, and my stomached seemed to eat its own walls. Now and then fits of cough had me trembling and spluttering blood on my hand.

Like me, Credence knew the end was approaching. He looked at me differently, stared longer, spaced out, rarely blinked. Were our lives the way lives used to be long ago, I’d think he was admiring me, but I was a piss-poor excuse of a person, and I was filthy and malnourished, sallow at best. That he still wanted me was out of pure instinct, no attraction; comfort. That was the type of bond we shared, out of cruel necessity.

It hurt to watch him wake up skinnier every morning and weaker every night. The coat looked too big on him, as big as my own felt on my shoulders.

Carrying the hefty weight of our fragile bodies, we walked less and less every day. And when winter arrived, we were still quite up North.

My wound had not healed well.

I remember rousing to a greyish, cottony sky. The clouds looked like downy feathers, and the soil beneath me was so cold I could not feel my limbs.

The snow was not white. Like everything else in our world, it was gray and lifeless, but just as cold.

I could hear birds chirping, but I knew most birds had either flown South or died. I smelled vanilla too, the one fragrance attached to my early childhood, and I saw Credence… radiant, happy. Not gaunt, not muddy, not beaten by sorrow. He was beautiful. Healthy.

He was not my Credence.

I wasn’t myself either, I was… slipping.

I heard hounds, heavy steps, empty laughs.

“You keep that bullet for yourself, okay?” I heard myself say. My voice was a rough whine and it trembled, my body convulsed strangely. Finally, I was dying. It wouldn’t be quick, and it would hurt. Weeks of starvation and my open wound would burn me up in a last feat of agony. “Go on, but be careful. Use the gun if they, if they come after you. They can’t… don’t let them—“

That bullet was my parting gift for Credence, I could give him a quick, painless death. I could save him from them.

“It’s yours, my boy. Yours.”

Credence shook his head, and put the gun on the ground as he lay next to me, “I can’t do it.”

“Yes, yes, you can. It’s simple. I showed you how to, remember? You just—don’t hesitate. Don’t think.”

Excruciating pain overcame me as I panted. My only regret was leaving Credence behind, alone. He was stronger than me, smarter and younger too. If anyone could make it, it was him, though I ignored what I meant by ‘it’.

There was no _it_ anymore. The world had gone to shit, and now I had to abandon Credence to survive on his own.

“Like I showed you,” I said softly, and my voice broke.

I taught the man I loved how to kill himself. The fucked-up thing was, it was a good thing. _Like this_ , I had said as my hand guided his, the gun entering my mouth, caressing the roof of it. _You try now, careful._ I blinked back bitter tears that day, I loathed my guts for two whole weeks.

“You should leave, before it’s too late, before more snow falls”, _before you see me die_.

“No.”

“No?”

“I won’t fucking leave you, Percival!”

We had no provisions left. We were cold and scared, an easy target in the sea of grey snow and black trees. They would come for us, whoever they were. Our lives would be snatched away.

I fell asleep to Credence’s heartbeat and the hollow echo of silence.

We had one bullet. Only one of us would die a painless death, and I was glad it’d be Credence. Mostly though, I wished we wouldn’t wake up.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr [ elvishflower ](http://elvishflower.tumblr.com/)


End file.
